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National Print Museum

Published in Issue 2 (Summer 1997), News, News, Volume 5

What was once a soldiers’ chapel in Beggars Bush Barracks, Haddington Road, Dublin 4, is now home to the National Print Museum. The former garrison chapel, built in the mid 1860s, houses artefacts from all sectors of the printing industry. Visitors are first introduced to the ‘father of printing’, Johann Gutenberg, creator of metal type and producer of the first substantial book, the Gutenberg Bible in 1455, and can experience at first hand how those first compositors typeset letter by letter and line by line.
The advent of hot metal casting with the nineteenth-century industrial revolution transformed the industry. The Linotype and Monotype machines are examples of this pioneering technology. The ornate printing presses stand proudly beside a Wharfedale press, known as the ‘war-horse’ of printing. The 1916 Proclamation was printed on one of these remarkable machines. The associated skills of bookbinding and stitching are also represented as is a pen-ruling machine, used to line thousands of children’s’ copybooks.
Headline events in world history are commemorated in framed newspaper pages which adorn the walls of the gallery upstairs, which features an impressive array of 1960s and 1970s computers, forerunners of today’s PCs and photocopiers. In addition an audio-visual presentation takes the viewer step by step through the printing process. The museum is open on a daily basis for guided tours.
Enquiries: (01) 6603770.

On this Day

April 25

1922 Commandant O’Neill, 3rd Cork Brigade IRA, was shot dead at the home of a Protestant family in Bandon, Co. Cork. In a series of unattributed reprisals, thirteen Protestant civilians were shot dead in the surrounding area over the following four days.
1920 RIC Sergeant Cornelius Crean, brother of the explorer Tom Crean, was killed by the IRA in an ambush near Upton, Co. Cork.
1870 Daniel Maclise (64), history and portrait painter who worked for most of his life in London, died.
1719 The life and strange adventures of Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe was published.
1819 Vere Foster, philanthropist and educationist, born in Copenhagen, where his Irish-born father was British minister.
1987 Lord Justice Gibson and his wife were killed by an IRA bomb as they crossed the border south of Newry, Co. Down.
1917 Ella Fitzgerald, jazz singer, born in Newport News, Virginia.
1922 Commandant O’Neill of the third Cork Brigade IRA was shot dead at the home of a Protestant family in Bandon, Co. Cork. In a series of unattributed reprisals, thirteen Protestant civilians were shot dead in the surrounding area between 26 and 29 April.
1915 During the First World War, Allied troops landed on Turkey’s Gallipoli Peninsula. The disastrous Gallipoli campaign, ending in January 1916, cost 46,000 Allied lives, including over 2,295 Irishmen.

National Print Museum

Personal Histories

On this Day

April 25